The Ghost of Frankenstein (or "Three Brains and a Monster")

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Mar 6, 2001

The fourth in the Universal’s Frankenstein series, THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942) is the first film in which Boris Karloff does not play The Monster. In his place is Universal’s most valuable player, Lon Chaney, Jr.

THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN continues the story of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (see my article Boris Karloff and the Frankenstein Trilogy Part 2), and at the same time denies what we know to be true from that film. At the end of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, the evil and decrepit hunchback Ygor was shot to death by Wolf Frankenstein, who then drop-kicked his father’s creation into a handy pit of boiling sulphur. Yet, at the beginning of this film, Ygor is still alive and so is the Monster. Illogical, yes, but par for the course for this series from this point on.

THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN never reaches the heights of its three predecessors, but it moves at such a breathless pace that it is impossible to resist. Frankenstein films usually end with torch-carrying villagers destroying the Frankenstein Castle. This film begins with that scene. It’s almost as if a James Bond film had begun with Bond blowing up the bad guy’s island. Where do you go from there?

W. Scott Darling’s screenplay for THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN goes all over the place, and has quite a time at every stop. Darling, an undistinguished B-movie writer whose greatest claim to fame was penning one Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film and a handful of late Laurel and Hardy films, works in as many Frankenstein clichés as he can, but director Erle C. Kenton doesn’t linger over any of them. Kenton knows we’ve seen it all before, and we don’t need it presented to us ceremoniously. He provides the shadows on the walls and the odd camera angles but otherwise goes about his business. What makes this film so entertaining is how it races through the exposition in the first five minutes to get us to the good stuff right away. The first three films were Houses of Horror – THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN is a Funhouse.

Ygor takes The Monster to a neighboring village to the laboratory of yet another son of the original Dr. Frankenstein. (Apparently, the first Dr. Frankenstein enjoyed creating life the old-fashioned way too.) This son, Ludwig, works with another doctor, the disgraced Dr. Brohmer (Lionel Atwill), a pioneer in the field of accidentally killing patients. Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein never appears to be “mad”, but he tips his hand when he has a conversation with his dead father. We also discover he has a valve in his laboratory that sends out poisonous gas through air vents (complete with reverse “vacuum” action for post-poisoning cleanup.) He does not, however, have his lab equipped with a gigantic, out in the open self-destruct lever like his father. The Frankensteins get a little smarter with each generation.

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The copyright of the article The Ghost of Frankenstein (or "Three Brains and a Monster") in Black-and-White Movies is owned by John Vincent Brennan. Permission to republish The Ghost of Frankenstein (or "Three Brains and a Monster") in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.